Bishop Brookins’ Ties to Cable Franchise Detailed

For the last seven years, Bishop H. H. Brookins and a group of influential black community leaders have owned a lucrative share of a city-awarded cable television franchise while having virtually no involvement or investment in the business, The Times has learned.

The cable contract for South-Central Los Angeles, approved by the City Council and Mayor Tom Bradley in 1983, is being challenged in a long-standing federal court suit by three black businessmen. They claim they lost the contract because they refused to follow advice by Bradley and a top aide, William Elkins, to form a partnership with Brookins and other politically connected minorities.

Cable industry analysts estimate the franchise is worth between $50 million and $100 million, which would bring Brookins’ share to at least $500,000. In 1987, a cable operator paid Brookins and his partners $500,000 and provided a $2-million loan, according to confidential documents obtained by The Times.

Financial details of the franchise have not been disclosed to the city. But three minority partners said that community leaders paid nothing for their ownership shares.

The cable deal, one of four city contracts that Brookins has obtained with the help of the Bradley Administration, is similar to a controversial city concessions contract at Los Angeles International Airport. The airport contract has paid $7.3 million in profits since 1985 to a small group of prominent minorities and women for doing little or no work, a city audit found. The airport minority partners include Brookins and Betty Dixon, wife of House Ethics Committee Chairman Julian C. Dixon (D-Los Angeles).

The lawsuit, filed by Carl and Clinton Galloway, alleges that they were denied the South-Central cable rights because they declined to merge their bid with Brookins, Brotherhood Crusade President Danny Bakewell and Channing Johnson, a former aide to Councilman Robert Farrell.

“There was no secret about it,” said Clinton Galloway, a Marina del Rey accountant. He said Bradley aide Elkins told him that “Bishop Brookins and Danny Bakewell must be taken care of. They sealed off the business for Tom Bradley’s friends.”

Dr. Carl Galloway, a Los Angeles internist, added: “We thought . . . ministers help you get into heaven, not cable franchises. We were stupid.”

Neither Brookins, a longtime Los Angeles church leader and political mentor to the mayor, nor his lawyer returned phone calls to their offices.

Bradley and Elkins declined to comment. The mayor’s spokesman, Bill Chandler, said Friday the Galloways have “made accusations against everyone and anyone in every forum available in their effort to force their way into a cable franchise in this community.”

In separate depositions taken in March, 1988, Bradley and Elkins each denied seeking to influence the cable selection process.

“All that we ever do is to try to make certain that credible minorities are in the bid process,” Elkins said. “I want to make this very, very clear: It is not the role of the mayor’s office ever to attempt to dictate who shall get a contract in this city.”

Bradley acknowledged, however, that he had urged the Galloways and other blacks vying for the cable contract to unite in order to increase the likelihood of a black-owned firm landing the franchise. “I thought it would be desirable if they could all come together in one group to support their bid,” he said.

Despite the involvement of Brookins and his community partners, South-Central became the last area of the city to get cable service beginning in 1988.

The City Council in 1982 rejected three bids--including one submitted by the Galloways--before awarding the South-Central franchise a year later to ACCESS Inc. The firm was owned by Eli Broad, a political supporter of Bradley who is head of Kaufman & Broad Home Corp. At the urging of the city, Broad offered 20% of the cable franchise to black community leaders and groups.

City records list the 10 minority partners as Brookins and his African Methodist Episcopal Church; Bakewell and his Brotherhood Crusade; the Revs. Thomas Kilgore and E. V. Hill and the Baptist Ministers Conference of Watts and South-Central Los Angeles; Ted Watkins, head of the Watts Labor Community Action Committee; Robert C. Davidson, president of Surface Protection Industries Inc., and ex-Farrell aide Channing Johnson.

The district attorney’s office investigated Johnson in 1982 for possible conflict of interest regarding the cable franchise, but prosecutors dropped the case when Johnson and Farrell refused to be interviewed.

Johnson, an attorney with the law firm of Kaye, Scholar, Fierman, Hays & Handler, said in an interview Thursday that he and Davidson struck a favorable deal with Broad and invested their own money in the franchise. He said he manages a limited partnership that owns 6.25% of the cable franchise.

“I don’t want to be associated with Brookins,” Johnson said. “I’m not one of these folks you pluck off the shelf because you have the right skin color or right contacts.”

Several of the partners contacted by The Times declined to provide any details about the cable contract.

The largest share among the minority partners is owned by the Brotherhood Crusade, whose 9.75% of the franchise is worth an estimated $5 million. The agency refused comment through its president, Bakewell. He also personally owns 0.5% of the franchise.

The AME Church in Los Angeles has no records showing an investment in the cable franchise, said Bishop Vinton Anderson. Brookins, who owns a 1% share of the franchise, was the Los Angeles region bishop for the 2.2-million member AME Church from 1976 to 1984. He is currently head of the AME church region for Maryland, Virginia and the District of Columbia.

Rev. Frank J. Higgins, president of the Baptist Ministers Conference of Los Angeles and Southern California, said the Baptist organization listed in city documents does not exist and that the church has not received any money from the cable franchise. The Baptist group’s share would be worth about $250,000.

“That group was really a dummy group,” said Higgins, who demanded that the city return the investment to the Baptist church.

Hill was a member of the Galloway team before joining with the Broad firm.

“It was quite a compromise from (a black-owned firm) wanting to own the franchise completely,” Hill said. “The compromise had to include that we weren’t going to pay no money out.”

Watkins said he was given a 0.5% ownership interest on behalf of his Watts community group in exchange for supporting the franchise award to Broad. “I don’t know whether we own anything or not because nobody has communicated anything with us,” he said. “I’ve got some bitter taste in my mouth about the whole thing.”

A third partner, Davidson, said he recalled that Brookins and other partners were given free shares while he and Johnson paid.

The South-Central cable area, which covers 167,000 homes, is one of 14 franchises awarded by the City Council and approved by the mayor. The franchise was sold twice and is now operated by Continental CableVision Inc., which has built about two-thirds of the system and currently serves 33,000 customers. CableVision officials declined to disclose the value of the franchise.

The cable deal is similar to the airport arrangement in that the city encouraged prime contractors to bring in minority partners without requiring the partners to invest or participate in the business.

An audit of city contracts was released on Thursday after reports by The Times that the minority and women business enterprise program at the airport and other city departments benefited influential individuals instead of economically disadvantaged minorities. The audit did not include the cable contracts.

C. Edward Corser, the city official overseeing the review, said the audit found that many contracts like the cable franchise fail to spell out the specific role of minority partners. “It’s the same problem . . . where we don’t have a clear definition of what is to be done for whom and for what payments,” he said.

The minority partners in the cable franchise have had no role in the operation since 1988 when construction began on the system, said Continental CableVision Vice President John Gibbs. During the four previous years, the franchise was dormant.

The city required the involvement of minorities in part to ensure that the cable operators would be sensitive to the needs of inner-city residents. But the franchise has been beset by financial problems and changes of ownership that delayed development of the system.

In requiring Broad to recruit minority partners, the city was following a practice routinely used by other municipalities, said Assistant City Atty. Ed Perez, who oversees city cable awards.

“It’s the old rent-a-citizen concept,” Perez said. “At that point in time, the council members didn’t feel (that requiring minority participation) was necessary. They might have a change of heart if they had to do it over again.”

Farrell, joined by two other black council members, insisted in the early 1980s that the South-Central cable franchise go to a black-owned company and “not just another (white) group that wants to get into L.A. and make a profit.”

Farrell said he was unaware that minority partners had not participated in the cable franchise. He said he will be “asking questions” when the contract is up for renewal.

That will not occur until the year 2002.

Hill said it was his understanding that minority partners were to participate in the operations and programming of the cable system. But that has not occurred, Hill said.

Davidson said the minority partners were supposed to serve on a board of directors, but that never took place.

However, Johnson said he was never told that he had to be involved in the cable operations. “For me, this is a business transaction. I’m not there to be a liaison to the black community for Continental Cable,” he said.

Before he resigned from Farrell’s office in 1980, Johnson was responsible for reviewing applications for the South-Central cable franchise, the councilman said in a 1988 deposition.

In that role, Johnson arranged a meeting at the law office of Farrell’s attorney, Pierpont Laidley, where he asked Carl Galloway to give him and Laidley a share of Galloway’s franchise bid, Galloway alleged in a sworn deposition.

Carl Galloway said he refused to become involved with Johnson because he was Farrell’s chief deputy at the time, according to deposition papers.

Laidley said last week that Galloway’s allegations are untrue. “I just can tell you I’m a poor lawyer. I’m not rich. I don’t extort people. I never have,” he said.

Johnson said that he could not recall any meetings with Galloway and denied that he reviewed cable proposals while serving on Farrell’s staff.

“This is a whole lot of sour grapes,” he said of the claims by the Galloway brothers. “They are making up these fairy tales.”

Three months after Johnson resigned from Farrell’s staff, he was listed in a city cable bid as a director of a black-owned firm that was competing against the Galloways. In 1983, Johnson was included as a minority partner to Broad’s franchise after he was recommended by Farrell, the councilman said in a deposition.

The city’s conflict-of-interest laws prohibit former city employees from representing an entity on a matter in which they were substantially involved while employed at City Hall. The conflict provision carries a one-year statute of limitations.

Prosecutors in the district attorney’s office concluded there was insufficient evidence to support an extortion allegation against Johnson, according to investigative reports.

Farrell’s attorney, Pierpont Laidley, advised the councilman not to talk to investigators because the “LAPD was on a fishing expedition,” according to police reports.

The cable lawsuit filed by the Galloway firm, Preferred Communications Inc., claims that the city’s award of the franchise to only one applicant violated its right to free speech under the First Amendment and unfairly restricted cable television competition. The U.S. Supreme Court ruled in the Preferred case in 1986 that the city may have violated the First Amendment and must justify in court its practice of allowing only one firm to serve part of the city. A trial scheduled for earlier this month was postponed until Oct. 2.

Perez, who is defending the city, said that the Galloways’ bid was rejected because it lacked adequate financial backing. “They are just a shell corporation looking for a lawsuit,” Perez said of the Galloways.

In 1979, the Galloway brothers and retired postal employee Perry Parks Jr. formed a joint-venture partnership with a New Jersey cable company to pursue the South-Central franchise. The council voted 7 to 6 against the Galloway bid in 1982.

The Galloways claim that they were told by city officials, including Bradley and Elkins, to drop their existing cable partners and join with Brookins and other black leaders seeking the franchise.

Clinton Galloway said he resented the mayor advising him to join with Brookins and his partners to get the bid.

“Why do I have to get together because I’m black?,” he said. “I don’t like the way (Brookins and his partners) do business. (The mayor) shouldn’t tell me who I have to do business with. It’s like old-time politics. They tell you these are the people you have to see.”

BROOKINS’ GOVERNMENT CONTRACTS The city’s award of the South-Central Los Angeles cable franchise to a group of community leaders in 1983 is one of four government contracts that Bishop H. H. Brookins has obtained with the help of the Tom Bradley Administration. The others are:

* A food and beverage concessions contract at the Los Angeles International Airport that has paid $7.3 million in profits since 1985 to Brookins and his partners. The contract was supposed to provide disadvantaged minorities and women with hands-on business experience, but Brookins said in a recent interview that he never participated in the concessions operation. Instead, Brookins said, his $300,000 share was compensation for his previous lobbying work at the airport.

* A $200-million contract to expand the Los Angeles Civic Center. Brookins was among six prominent minorities with close ties to Bradley whose lobbying and participation helped a developer win the contract in 1988, despite protests of “cronyism” by some city officials. Brookins’ partners include Danny Bakewell, president of the Brotherhood Crusade, and Samuel Williams, an attorney and longtime Bradley confidante.

* A $336,000 loan of federal poverty funds to renovate a run-down office complex in Southwest Los Angeles. The subsidies were awarded by the city between 1982 and 1985 to a non-existent California church corporation. A city investigation concluded that Brookins disguised his ownership of the building to receive the loan.